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Students Learn To Write Viruses
snocrossgjd writes "In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren't hackers — they're students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. Their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus software."
Why bother trying to "penetrate antivirus software?" Just tell the user to kindly disable it else they'll be denied their dopey smiley emoticon pack or the privilege of having the Taco Bell dog read them their email or some shit.
Why bother working to evade potentially sophisticated technological security when you can go after the very very weakest link... the user?
I love the smell of burning karma in the morning.
Smells like... victory.
Sounds like these students might actually learn something about computer security from this class.
I was under the impression that all security courses worth their salt taught skills that could potentially be used maliciously. How does one learn how to be a penetration tester? What makes this case different?
Polymorphism is at least an option in most Computer Science courses. Does one really need to sit down and be taught "how to write viruses" specifically? Or can a huge amount of people who write code use their initiative and learn how to write any kind of application?
What companies? Would they want to work there anyway?
In ordinary English, a hacker is somebody who hacks into a computer system. That's not the way you and I use the word, but we're not most people. "Hacker" is one many words that means different things depending on who uses it and in one context. Language is not a map.
Hackers (in the senses of "improvisational programmer" or "ethical student of security technology") often don't grasp this, and insist that the common usage of "hacker" is "incorrect" — even though the people who use it that way are in the majority. They've tried to get people to say "cracker" instead, ignoring the very small role Nabisco plays in computer security issues.
I'd like to take a course on penetration. I might actually learn something.
Well, they said it was a windowless class, so I guess it's higher than entry level.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
I used to write viruses. Evading anti-virus software was sort of like the testing//tweaking phase of software development -- "oops, mcafee flagged it as suspicious, let me modify this line of code here, this one here... ahah, fixed".
The truth is, anti-virus technology hasn't significantly changed since the DOS days. It's all about heuristics, pattern-matching, and behavior-preventing. It's trivial to evade these technologies.
Yes, but why are they even caring? I mean, today I picked up a copy of 2600 from a local bookstore, in there I learned how to Arp poisoning, obtain malware via a honeypot, and all kinds of info that is similar to this. Yet I don't see the FBI raiding 2600's publisher burning all copies of the magazine.
You can get cracking techniques from loads of places, this guy's teachings is old news.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Because breaking into things and creating stealthy shit is the greatest problem solving skill you will ever find.
By nature, to break into a computer, you have to force it to do something it (software, sometimes hardware i.e. Intel errata) was specifically not designed to do. Usually this amounts to something not obvious to 100% of the rest of the world for some strange reason being obvious to you. The more experience you have warping completely tame and working interfaces in perverse ways due to minor quirks, the easier this becomes.
Load modules and shared objects aren't designed to be altered like that; and in this case you have a system designed specifically to catch and prevent you from doing what you're doing. This is, again, forcing something into a position it's not designed to operate in to achieve a predictable result.
Carmack's Reverse, Duff's Device, and even Edison's light bulb worked from these same principles; remember, by its very nature you cannot have light without fire.
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"In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses" it's IMPOSSIBLE! Viruses need Windows and they won't run in a Windowsless environment.
I'd like to take a course on penetration. I might actually learn something.
Unlike college courses, those 'teachers' charge by the hour.
Though if you are in college, you could take it as an... extracurricular.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users.
Ah-hah! Got ya!
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
as a two-semester course.
It is held at the technical university in vienna and is called "InetSec"
http://www.iseclab.org/InetSec/
The course has a very high quality and includes practical exercises like sql exploits, writing buffer overflows, trojans and the like.
You even get your own automatically generated "1337 handle" upon subscription to the course, and you can advance from "script kiddy" (not homework assignments aka challenges turned in) to "master guru" (turned in everything + extra work + participated in a CTF) - so actually participating in the course is more fun and play than work ;)
I wonder why that article is news, since there is a CTF (http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/CTF/) held every year, where a lot of universities and colleges from everywhere participate - i doubt they don't have similar courses.
Then again, since the viennese guys kick ass at these contests... ;)
You become better, we become better. It's a race, nothing more, nothing less. And I think both sides know that neither side will eventually win.
The question today isn't whether AV kits can catch every virus out there. The question today is, can we make development of malware so expensive that it doesn't pay anymore? Malware development isn't the pastime of some pimple-faced teen with too much time and no girlfriend on his hands. Malware is, simply and plainly, a business. And like every business, it aims at profit.
The goal of AV kits today is just to minimize that profit the malware distributors can gain. We know that we can't find every virus some teen hacks out to prove that we can't find his trojan. Ok, we can't. Mission accomplished. But your trojan doesn't bother us or anyone, unless it becomes the next Sasser. You are no threat. What does your trojan do? Hijack your friend's WoW password? Get offa my lawn and come back when you've become more than an annoyance.
Today, malware has to be "important" to be hunted by AV companies. I.e. it has to cost more than a handful of people money. It has to spread wide, has to hijack EBay and PayPal accounts (and bank accounts if possible), be a spambot or something else that actually has some impact. And those packages are invariably developed and employed by organisations who aim at making money.
So the goal today has changed, from protecting you to stifling their income (which also serves to protect you, in a way). Yes, we're trying to keep back the ocean that comes with a tsunami with a broom. Our back is against the wall. The best we can do today is to limit their income in an attempt to show them it's more profitable to go back to good ol' burglary.
When you, as a private person, write some malware and release it into the world, you'll eventually be detected, too. But you're not important. The damage you do, the footprint you leave on the international detection grid, is so insignificant that, sorry if I'm so blunt, you don't count.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Back when the Morris worm hit in '88, I was teaching assembly language. We'd spent the whole day on the worm (making sure it hadn't planted or destroyed any files on our machines) and I didn't have a lecture prepared by class time. So I told them I'd explain the worm instead but that they could leave if they wanted since it wouldn't be on the exam. Our topic the week before was how the stack was changed during function calls so they already had the background. No one left and I got the pleasure of watching faces light up around the room as it dawned on people where my explanation was going. Ah, those were the days...
Devon